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Below is the press conference presentation (in Japanese with English interpretation) given by Professor Toshihide Tsuda of Okayama University at the Foreign Correspondence Club of Japan (FCCJ) on October 8, 2015 (Japan time).

On October 6, 2015, an epidemiological analysis of Fukushima thyroid cancer data by Professor Tsuda's research group was published online ahead of print in Epidemiology, official journal of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. The main author of the study, Professor Tsuda is an environmental epidemiologist who has devoted himself to clarifying the cause of health effects in numerous environmental cases such as Minamata disease, Nishi-Yodogawa air pollution in Osaka, and recognition of lung cancer in pneumoconiosis patients as an occupational disease.

On the September 21, 2015 issue of the New York Times, a science writer George Johnson published an article, "When Radiation Isn’t the Real Risk," which starts with the following phrase: "This spring, four years after the nuclear accident at Fukushima, a small group of scientists met in Tokyo to evaluate the deadly aftermath."

No details are given by George Johnson as to who these scientists are except for Mohan Doss, a medical physicist. It is not clear if this was intentional. Below is some background information on this meeting and the rest of its participants, followed by some interesting facts relating to the potential political ties and the stance (or the lack of stance) of radiation hormesis model in radiation protection. (Note: This post focused on presenting facts on selective aspects of Johnson's ill-written article).

＊＊＊＊＊ SAMRAI 2014 and SARIThe meeting by “a small group of scientists” referred to by Johnson's RAW DATA article in the September…

Radiation Safety Research CenterNuclear Technology Research LaboratoryCentral Research Institute of Electric Power Industry

Currently our center is not conducting research on radiation hormesis.Based on the knowledge gained so far, we consider it difficult to generalize the effects of hormesis as the low-dose radiation effects and to incorporate them into the radiation risk assessment.There are some instances where merchandise with hormesis effects are sold with reference to our research results, but our center has nothing to do with it.

From the 1990s to the early 2000s, our center conducted studies to verify the effects of radiation hormesis. We elucidated that various hormesis-like effects were induced by low-dose radiation in animal experiments under certain conditions. However, at this time, we consider i…

Below is an English translation of the information released by Fukushima Medical University at the August 31, 2015 meeting of the 20th Oversight Committee for the Fukushima Health Management Survey. It includes surgical and pathological details of the 96 thyroid cancer cases operated on at Fukushima Medical University as of March 31, 2015. (See this post for an English translation of the previous version released on November 11, 2014).

These 96 cancer cases, along with one case post-surgically diagnosed to be a benign nodule and 7 cases operated on at other medical facilities, comprise the 104 cases (99 from the first round and 5 from the second round screening) that had undergone surgeries as of the 19th Oversight Committee Meeting for the Fukushima Health Management Survey held on May 19, 2015. This information is essentially the most updated details of the surgical cases since only one more surgical case (papillary thyroid cancer; age and tumor size unknown) was added as of June 30,…